Posted on 07/09/2013 10:48:18 PM PDT by ClaytonP
The rise of China is on everyone’s mind, but the implications of the ascension of this superpower seem vague at this point. There are a number of questions about what China will do, what path it will take, and whether it will act with increasing aggression in the Pacific and begin to throw its weight around in direct confrontations with the West. Many fear that with an excess of males who cannot find wives, China will grow increasingly warlike and unstable. Although the fundamental premise behind this is typically androphobic, many young Chinese men would surely agree that there is a problem, which is only being compounded by the increasingly feminist behavior of urban Chinese women.
There’s plenty of debate about the implications of a rising China and the associated demographic problems, but one thing we do know for certain is that China is making increasingly bold moves into Africa.
China has long had ties to Africa. Maoism, as an anti-colonial form of Communism, holds particular appeal to former colonial subjects, and this includes most of Africa. Throughout the 60s and 70s, most of China’s involvement with Africa was cultural and ideological, consisting mainly of student exchanges and joint declarations. At that point China was too poor and disorderly to accomplish much beyond its own borders. But things have changed a great deal. As the West has ignored its former colonies, focusing only on lecturing them about transparency, democracy and recently feminism, China has been making deals, building cities and settling hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals on the continent. As of today, there are nearly a million Chinese in sub-Saharan Africa, and that number is growing week by week.
In contrast to recent European colonials, Chinese are making permanent settlements in the tropics, importing peasants to farm the fertile river valleys of West and Central Africa. Chinatowns are popping up in the jungles of Cameroon and Congo. Chinese farmers in traditional coolie hats are farming rice using the same methods as in the warmer parts of southern China. Chinese fishermen are dominating the local fisheries, shoving the inefficient pirogues aside and taking the lion’s share of the catch. Construction and retail are now dominated by Chinese. Chinese medicine is becoming the standard for Chinese and natives alike. It’s a remarkable transformation that has happened very rapidly, right under the world’s nose.
There are a number of reasons Chinese are better suited to settle tropical Africa than Europeans were in the 19th and 20th century, including population pressure, modern medicine, air travel and China’s growing economic clout. Acclimatization probably plays a role as well. Europeans had a tendency to succumb to tropical conditions and diseases, whereas southern Chinese have been living in similar conditions for millennia. They are probably constitutionally better equipped to handle the stifling, moist heat of Sub-Saharan Africa than Europeans from cold and damp or warm and dry climates, and indeed many, if not most, of the farmers are from subtropical regions of China. Additionally, finding a wife may be difficult for Chinese farmers back home, but in Africa it’s no problem at all.
Chinese are also well-equipped to farm in Africa. Their traditional crops do quite well in the humid environment, and it wouldn’t take many Chinese farmers to turn a number of African countries into net food exporters. In fact, given the size and potential of Africa, a few tens of millions of Chinese farmers – a mere 2% of China’s population – could produce enough extra food to give both Asia and Africa a food surplus and lay the groundwork for the industrialization of Africa. Although the prospect of a Chinese “invasion” of Africa may conjure up images of ethnic cleansing and displacement, that’s unlikely to be the case. The concept of the color line has never existed for the Chinese, so the more likely scenario is some degree of assimilation through marriage. This has always been the Chinese way of relating to people on the fringes of their culture, so I don’t see why it would be any different in Africa. And, in fact, there is precedent for this; Chinese graves from the Ming dynasty have been discovered in East Africa, and the ancestors of settlers, some bearing Chinese-sounding surnames, apparently still exist.
However, despite the possible benefits and advantages of a large Chinese influx into Africa, there would surely be major problems as well. The largest of these, no doubt, would be local opposition to Chinese immigration, and the next would likely be Western opposition. The issue of local opposition is likely to be a tough one, but not insurmountable, as large parts of Africa are entirely undeveloped and uninhabited, despite having great agricultural and productive potential. As for the West, the question is whether the we are serious about economically engaging Africa or would prefer to sit back and preach about democracy and transparency. Democracy is a farce in most of Africa, and elections frequently degenerate into tribal warfare. Leaders backed by the West are as corrupt as anyone else, and decades of “assistance” and “guidance” have resulted in nothing more than stagnation, genocide (Rwanda) and the world’s worst civil war in years (in the Congo). A sorry record indeed…
The stupidity of Western policy in regards to Africa, largely a result of ideological blinkers and deliberate self-deception, has prevented all but a handful of entrepreneurs and established businesses from doing any business on the continent. Native corruption has been significantly exacerbated by the West’s policy of giving loans and assistance directly to kleptocrats who in turn use them to consolidate their stranglehold on national wealth, which they typically spirit out of the country to spend on Western luxuries. In the meanwhile, the West scolds China for dealing with corrupt regimes that perpetrate human rights abuses — in which they are complicit! So, as the Western economic presence dwindles to a few petroleum companies and various international criminals involved in gun-running and the like, the Chinese sign enormous development deals and turn a profit by being entirely pragmatic about the political situation. And most indications so far are that they are improving the quality of the ordinary African’s life.
One important consideration that eludes most of us here in the West is that China’s development model is far more appropriate for Africans than what we have to offer. As recently as the 1970s, most Chinese lived what we would regard as a medieval lifestyle. Americans in particular are so far removed from this mode of life that we can’t really conceive of it, yet this is the reality for most sub-Saharan Africans today. It wasn’t until the late 1970s, after the end of the Cultural Revolution and the ascension of Deng Xiaoping to power, that China began to modernize agriculture and small business. The native entrepreneurial spirit of the Chinese combined with a loosening of Communist economic restrictions led to a rapid rise in productivity, culminating in the thriving China of today — all in barely more than a generation. As recently as 1998, I stayed with peasants in the hills just outside the Beijing prefecture who had just then received their first mechanized farm equipment, which consisted of little more than a few mechanical pumps and a very tiny tractor (one of these things). People would still thresh their grain on the hard pavement of the newly constructed roads, even in one of the most economically advanced regions of the country. I never saw anything like the gargantuan combines we have out here in the Palouse country.
If Westerners actually cared about being truly helpful, not to mention honest and humane, they’d recognize that Africa needs a step-by-step approach to development, starting with simple, effective tools and technology. The idea that we are going to save the Africans by giving them solar panels and specially designed laptops is stupid and irresponsible; at best it’s meaningless self-indulgence, and at worst it’s a scam designed to rip off feeble-minded but well-meaning westerners while doing nothing of concrete value for the intended recipients. Simply teaching Africans to build better rice paddies and farm rice – something the Chinese are already doing – would have a much more significant humanitarian impact than sending consumer electronics to people who can’t even feed themselves, let alone reliably generate and transmit electricity.
Despite the lack of any meaningful contribution to African development since the mid-20th century, I don’t expect the West to concede the continent to Chinese. In fact, the remnants of the white colonial culture in Francophone Africa are already experiencing increasing tensions with the encroaching Chinese (partly because the Chinese cannot speak French), and political resistance to Chinese engagement with Africa is growing stronger year by year. Given what meager returns the West has gleaned from trade with Africa in recent years, it’s hard to see this as motivated by anything other than spite, but on the other hand the West will have to do something if we want to have a chance of competing for the vast economic opportunities offered by the continent. Unfortunately, unless there is a return to pragmatism, the only option for doing so is probably through violence, and I wouldn’t put it past Western governments to foment insurrections with the goal of making it extraordinarily difficult for Chinese to operate in Africa.
But perhaps Africans, Westerners and Chinese will come together and work something out that more or less benefits everyone. The wealth of Africa could contribute a great deal to Africa, Asia and the rest of the world, and one of China’s most pressing demographic problems could be solved by putting the millions of excess men to work making that happen. Replacing Africans, of course, is not the end goal, and it won’t happen in any event — Africa is already home to a billion people and growing, and can easily absorb some 20 million Chinese. Limited immigration is manageable, and already happening, whether the West likes it or not. If we accept the idea, we’ll be in a much better position to influence the outcome and derive benefit. If we don’t, there’s a very good chance Africa will be the next setting for a series of proxy wars that will waste both blood and wealth, because the Chinese are in for the long haul.
So size really does not matter.
I guess at least a single meal a day matter more in Africa.
Also there is also a looming surplus of males in India. Since China and India share a border, I guess this could be sorted out in an China-India 21st century war.
200 million men marching across india and the middle east.
“The stupidity of Western policy in regards to Africa, largely a result of ideological blinkers and deliberate self-deception, has prevented all but a handful of entrepreneurs and established businesses from doing any business on the continent.”
No ‘ideological blinkers’ or ‘self-deception’ about it; Africa is home to countless of the world’s most corrupt and violent sh*t holes.
Wow, a black chinese baby.
IIRC, I think China even explored Africa around the 1400’s until they closed themselves from the rest of the world.
I called this a long time ago....
LMAO!!
Ping to me for later...
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